Wednesday Night, August 5, 2020 PM

Are his to give to all who are in him. And so as Jesus teaches now, as the second and greater Moses, having come down the mountain just like Moses did, now he's speaking to the people and telling them how these things are going to be.

And he says, choose life in order that you may live as he sets out blessings and cursings. It really has everything to do with whether or not somebody is with Christ or against Christ. Now, we've certainly had a lot of that displayed for us in Luke thus far, as there's all kinds of people who are excited about Christ and following Christ and for him.

And there's a whole bunch of people who aren't. They're upset with him. They think he's doing the wrong thing and they're plotting against him already. So at this juncture, there are blessings for those who are with him and there are woes for those who are against him.

And we looked at verse 20 and we looked at the two phrases here. First of all, he says, and turning his gaze toward his disciples. And so his main focus is on his disciples. He's got things to say to those who aren't his disciples, but he's focusing on them.

And he began to say, blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God. We talked about that last week about what does he mean? Well, Jesus is doing something rather surprising. In this first section, he is talking about those who seem to have no reason to be happy, but they are.

And in the next group of people, he's talking about those who would seem to have every reason to be content and happy, but in fact, they're not blessed at all. So he says in verse 20, and turning his gaze toward his disciples, he began to say, blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who hunger now for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now for you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you and ostracize you and insult you and scorn your name is evil for the sake of the son of man.

Be glad in that day and leap for joy for behold your reward is great in heaven for in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets. But woe to you who are rich for you are receiving your comfort in full.

Woe to you who are well fed now for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.

So the first group, poor, hungry, weeping, hated. Man, wouldn't you hate to be on that team? Yeah, that's the no good sorry team. People that have all that on their shoulders, they've got nothing going for them and yet Jesus is saying, blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed, happy are all these people.

Fortunate they are. Well off are these folks. So also not just the poor but also those who hunger. And even as Jesus was saying, he wasn't saying that those who are poor have merited God's favor because they have the character quality of being poor.

He was, no, he was saying, you think the poor have nothing going for them but those who have me, those who have Christ, those who have the kingdom of God are happy and blessed. I mean, you can have, if you have the kingdom of God and you're poor, you're still well off, you're still fortunate.

And if that's true of the poor, it's true of anybody who's in the kingdom of God. It's not about your financial situation, it's about your spiritual situation which then interprets everything else. But also the hungry, blessed are the malnourished.

Well, you don't hear that very often, do you? Jesus' words are as controversial as they ever were. Happy are the hungry, blessed are the malnourished. Blessed are you who hunger now for you shall be satisfied.

So we have the present tense, you are hungry now, but in the future tense, you shall be satisfied. Now, many people read this verse and they do a little comparison with Matthew, with the account in Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount.

Blessed are those who are poor in spirit, it says, for yours is the kingdom of heaven. And it goes on to say, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for you shall be satisfied. And they look at this passage and they say, well, obviously we have the same content, we have the same situation.

So they just go ahead and supply that spiritual side and say this hunger is a spiritual hunger for righteousness. And I understand why, and I'm not saying that's necessarily an awful thing or anything like that.

And yet, I don't know if that's the right thing to do, to shunt this text onto a purely spiritual track. I mean, we certainly have Matthew's version of the Beatitudes, and we can say, well, scripture interprets scripture, and I agree with that, but I think we need to be a little careful.

We must not assume that these texts cover the same moment. We don't have to assume that, and we don't have to assume that this is the same sermon or constrain Jesus's content as a teacher. There's enough differences in the text, in the structure of the text.

Here we have four blessings and four woes, and in Matthew, you have nine Beatitudes. He says, blessed, blessed, blessed nine times, he says. And here you have four blessings and four woes. I think it's probably two different occasions.

And I think we can think about that, and at the same time, we don't have to say, well, obviously Jesus is disagreeing with himself. No, he's not. No, he's not. I've been here for six years, and I know I've repeated myself.

Some of you probably keep in track.

Oh, here we go again.

What our Savior says in Matthew is true, and what he says in Luke is true. These things are not opposed. In fact, they almost teach the same lesson, but they have somewhat different starting points. That should not be remarkable to us, that the master teacher has more than one way to approach a subject and to get his point across.

That should not be a surprise to us. And in this way, I think that we should take this not as spiritual hunger, but I think we should take it just as it is physical hunger, just as we talked about financial poverty.

I think it's just straight up poverty. He's talking about those folks are poor, and these folks are hungry. And I think Jesus is looking at his disciples, as it says in verse 20, he's looking out on his disciples, and he saw some that were poor, and then he looked out on his disciples, and he saw some that were hungry in their poverty.

This is worse.

I mean, it's one thing to be poor, but to be poor and hungry, that's worse. That means you have little to no prospect to satisfy your hunger. We laugh at ourselves, don't we, about our first world problems.

The automatic sprinklers fail, and then the garage door motor burns out on the same day, and we've just had it with our trials and our tribulations.

Right?

It's difficult, isn't it? It's difficult to conceive of the deeply rooted fear and anxiety that the poor experience when it comes to food, clothing, and shelter. Jesus dealt with these matters at some length in Matthew six, doesn't he?

He talks about giving, and fasting, and prayer, and trusting God. He deals with those issues. But throughout scripture, the hope of the gospel is expressed in these three ways. Christ our food, Christ our clothing, Christ our shelter.

What is God up to? God provides for his children, but I think the point needs to be made, and I think the scripture makes it, that the lack of these basic necessities, food, clothing, and shelter, that is so common in history, and so common still in our world today for so many, and I'm not thinking about the North American continent at all, okay?

Just thinking globally, okay? The lack of these basic necessities, which is a symptom of the curse, and often the direct result of sin, either one's own personal sin or somebody else's sinning against somebody else, the lack of food, clothing, and shelter, I think is used by God to draw men to his son, Jesus Christ.

And he says, it's the bread of life, the robe of righteousness, and the temple of God. All the way through the scriptures, and those are just a few of the metaphors that we have of Christ, as our food, and as our clothing, and as our shelter.

So, but I really do think it's physical hunger. I think it's actually physical hunger that he's seeing. Now, when he says, blessed are the hungry, he's not saying that the hungry are closer to God because they're hungry, right?

Like some of the hermits, or the ascetics of old, or even currently would purposefully, harmfully malnourish themselves, because they think that that would impress God. Or, and it's the same case, that it doesn't say, it's not saying blessed are the hungry because the people who have no food, are just by merits of having no food, are just that much better.

But it's logical to begin with the general heading of poor, and then begin to particularize their problems. The most immediate problem of the poor is the fact that they have no food. Now, we've talked about the poor in Jesus' day as qualitatively different than the poverty profile offered to us here in America.

I used to be rather moved by all the claims of hunger. Beck and I would use to give our own food for the needy who called the church for help, back when we were in Tennessee, and call comes in, our truck broke down, and we couldn't afford to get it fixed in time to get to the health department to renew our paperwork for food stamps, and now we don't have enough food to last for the month for our children, and complicated, mess of a story.

And then we would bring some food together, use the church's funds to go buy some food from the local grocery store, and we'd have it all together, and then they would roll up in their Escalade to collect, over and over and over, and we lived in the poorest county in all of Tennessee.

We did, I mean, just by the numbers, and we lived in the poorest county in Tennessee, and so there was benevolence needs all over the place, but we just never actually found anybody who was really actually in need, and just, we couldn't find them.

We tried and tried, in that sense. And this is going on, yet genuine hunger still exists in many places due to sin and the curse. There are people who are actually starving, people who are actually malnourished, people who are actually very, very sick because they don't have the food.

Here's my observation, and it's not unique to me, that where Christianity becomes well-established, where the reign of Christ is free to confess and robustly obeyed, poverty and hunger do not completely disappear, but they are widely, widely pushed back and restrained, and that the resulting effect of our spiritual forbearers is still, in some sense, having a blessing on our land today.

The fact of the matter remains, however, that due to the depravity of mankind, wherein every intent of the thought of the heart is only evil continually, man can use hunger, even hunger, or even use the plight of the hungry to advance the self.

Jesus himself encountered this, did he not? He encountered those who were just manipulating him to get food, and they were really poor. They were really hungry, but they were just trying to milk him for whatever they could.

You know, Moses gave us bread from heaven, what will you do, you know? They tried to manipulate him into giving them food. His response was not, well, it doesn't matter the motive, only that I do justice.

His response wasn't, well, it doesn't matter what their motive is, I'll just give them food anyway. That was not his response. John 6 offers us a different narrative, in which he challenged them about the gospel.

I understand you're hungry, I understand you want food, but there's something more important to think about at this point, okay? The blessing of the hungry is not the ability to demand food. There is providential hunger, and this is really important.

Now, notice what Jesus is doing. He turns his gaze toward his disciples, and he says, verse 21, "'Blessed are you who hunger now.'". Who's he talking to? Who's he talking to? He's talking to his disciples.

We're not talking about the unrepentant poor who use their poverty as a means for unjust gain. They certainly do need help, and I think we can help them in various ways, but at this point, he's not saying, how blessed are you who hunger, being hungry is a good thing.

He's not saying that. He's not saying that. Jesus lifts his eyes upon his disciples, and he pronounced blessings upon those poor who believed in him, those hungry who believed in him. Why are they blessed?

Because they have Christ. They have the whole kingdom of God. Listen, if the king loves you, you've got it made. And if the king of the kingdom of God eternally loves you unconditionally, I don't have the words to tell you how good you have it.

But Jesus does.

He says, blessed. He says, blessed. He says, even the poor who have him are blessed. Even the hungry disciple is blessed. Not to mention the fact that in the community of saints, not one church member of our local church should ever go hungry, right?

We have a bunch of passages in the scripture from analogies from the Old Testament community of Israel to very specific instructions to the church in the New Testament that our love for one another means that if you're a member of this local church, you're not gonna go hungry.

You're blessed.

You're in the kingdom of God, and this is a local embassy of the kingdom of God.

Welcome.

You're a member in good standing here, and there's all sorts of things that we'll do for you, and we love you and support you, but you're not gonna go hungry, right? Not in the church of Jesus Christ, you're not.

So you're blessed there because you have Christ, you have the community of Christ. Disciples, remember, in the context, disciples have gathered, these people have gathered to Jesus, even as far away as Tyre and Sidon and from Jerusalem.

These are not easy journeys. It would be difficult for them to have the means to do that. So many in the crowds around Jesus, we know in other stories, often were hungering, and they didn't have any immediate resources to satisfy their hunger.

But oddly enough, at this point, we see that Jesus is looking at his disciples, and he's saying directly to them, blessed are you who are hungry now. What is he observing about those in front of them?

There are people right in front of them who are hungering right then. And he's just been doing miracles. He's been healing the sick, casting out demons. Why doesn't he just give them bread?

Why not?

Why is he just saying, well, blessed are you who are hungry now? Why doesn't he just give them bread? Isn't that the more important thing? Does it seem callous? Does it seem callous? Why would Christ let them be hungry in this moment right here, right now?

God let the children of Israel be hungry in the wilderness.

Why?

To teach them to depend upon him, to look for the bread from heaven. And could that be what Jesus intends here? God works what is not good. You know, malnourishment, physical hunger. I mean, that's not a good thing.

That's not good. God made an abundance of food for Adam and Eve and said that's very good, okay? So it's not good to be malnourished and not have food. But what Jesus does is to point them to something better.

Isn't this what we do when we fast? We forego what is good for what is more important. Right, when we fast? Unless we begin with God, his sovereignty and providence, we have to begin with God, his sovereignty and providence when we think about hunger or need.

If we don't, we're only left with this first sense. Malnourished, underfed, hungry people is a bad thing. Yes, it is. That's a bad thing, that's true. But for those who trust in Christ, they have comfort and hope and they are blessed.

They have a promise to hold to. And this is temporary hunger. Hunger can be unbearable if you have no prospect for food. But if you're ravenously hungry, maybe you're even weak and a little bit sick from, food's on the way.

You'll eat soon. The fact that it's temporary, oh, I can hold out. Since you know food's coming, I can last, right? When your personal hunger is placed into its proper temporary context, it is bearable.

Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Your hunger, Jesus says, is temporary. Your hunger is temporary. You are going to be satisfied. But for the non-believer, for the non-believer, hunger is absolute final oppression.

There is no hope. There is no promise, is there? For the believer, hunger, like all suffering, is temporary.

It's temporary.

Those who have the kingdom of God, well, physical hunger has an end, and it's a satisfying end. Hunger in the now will be satisfied in the not yet, and satisfied in such a way, more than just the maintenance of the physical body, or even just comfort for the anxious soul.

Hungering disciples are blessed, fortunate, well-off, and happy.

Why?

Because their momentary light affliction is producing for them an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison. This, it's hard to grasp this, but there are our brothers and sisters in Christ who are purposefully malnourished all over this globe as part of persecution.

What is the promise? What is the promise? If they have Christ, they're still blessed, and their hunger is temporary, just like the rest of the sufferings that we may encounter. So, let's think about faithful hunger.

Even as we understand hunger as a particular of poverty, we should understand this satisfaction listed in verse 21 as a particular of the kingdom of God. So, he says, blessed are ye who are poor, and then blessed are ye who hunger.

He says, yours is the kingdom of God. You shall be satisfied. These things are related. They're hungry because they're poor, and the satisfaction is because you have the kingdom of God. So, we have to understand hunger, affliction, suffering, and need in terms of the blessing of being in the kingdom.

How blessed are the born-again hungry?

Right, why?

They have a heavenly father who knows all their needs before they ask, and he desires them to ask for their daily bread, and he loves to provide for them, and he provides for them very often through his other children, right?

They have as their savior the Lord, the Son, the Son of the Father, who gave himself as the bread of life. He offers himself as the bread of communion. He intercedes for them at the right hand of God.

He is the good shepherd who leads his sheep into green pastures and restores our souls. They have the Holy Spirit who brings to mind all the things that Jesus has taught. Why is that a blessing? Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

So, how happy are the hungry in God, in Christ? This is the surprising but true teaching of Christ. But even if the physically hungry, even if malnourished disciples of Jesus are happy and blessed, if that's the case, if that is the case, and it is, is it not also true of the rest of the well-nourished believers?

Our satisfaction is not in the fact that we've eaten well today, even as the satisfaction of those who haven't eaten well that day isn't based on what they ate, right? So, if the satisfaction of the hungry is not in what they ate, then the satisfaction of the well-fed should not be in what they ate, right?

Okay, so this is the way that Jesus often teaches. He goes to, well, if this is true, then how much of the more over here? Okay, it's a very common pattern. And that's what he's doing here. I think the way he wants us to read this and use it.

There's no merits in being poor, and there's no virtue in being rich. There's no merits in being hungry, and there's no virtue in being fat. The point, the point is to be happy in Jesus, to be happy in Jesus.

Our satisfaction, our blessedness, is not dependent upon what's on the table or what's not on the table or what's in the pantry or what is lacking in the pantry. The point is satisfaction in Christ. As we think about these two blessings together, stewardship, stewardship looks different for the poor and the non-poor.

Stewardship still exists. Stewardship looks different for the poor and for the non-poor, but it should not be different in where it looks. We must all look to Christ. That's where our, that's where our satisfaction is.

That's where our blessedness is. And that's where our unity is. That's where our unity is. I think of the moment where Paul was talking to the Corinthians about how they're doing a very bad job of gathering.

They're not gathering well. They're coming together, and they're supposed to be having the Lord's Supper, they're supposed to be having communion together, but they're not doing it, not really, because some of them who have a lot are just showing up and eating and eating and eating and stuffing themselves.

So obviously they're not really, and the other people are showing up, and they don't have any, and the people who have a lot are not showing with those who don't, and they're all part of this one local church.

He's like, that's not communion. That's not communion. But if those who had a lot and those who didn't have enough all had their satisfaction in Christ, then their unity, their love for one another would be on display in how those with a lot would graciously share with those who needed it, who graciously received it all to the glory of God.

That's how it's supposed to work in the church.

All right.

Any questions or thoughts about being hungry? I don't know if you've eaten supper yet or not. How long is he gonna keep on going? Your hunger is temporary. Oh yes, Red wants to know when Wednesday night supper is going to begin again.

We could put that on the prayer request.

Okay, okay.

Well, what can we pray for tonight? Who can we pray for tonight?

Yes.

Let's pray for those in.